The research opens new possibilities for making biotechnological processes faster and more sustainable

Engineers are taking their innovations for producing high-performance, high-value biobased carbon fiber from batch production in a lab to commercially relevant continuous production.

Salk scientists find a receptor called SRF3 that manages cellular iron levels while simultaneously regulating the plant’s immune response. Discovery reveals previously unknown mechanism that allows plants both to absorb this essential nutrient and defend against microbes, informing future crop resilience efforts. Study also provides insights into cellular mechanisms that could be relevant in mammalian cells and key signaling proteins in cancer and beyond.

A research team led by Prof. Haruki WATANABE, Professor in the Department of Physics and the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), in collaboration with Prof. Yukitoshi MOTOME and graduate student Sena WATANABE from the University of Tokyo, has developed a unified theory that predicts when two states of matter are genuinely distinct and when they are secretly the same. The breakthrough provides a general framework for classifying phases across magnetic systems with different spin values and resolves a long-standing debate surrounding the behavior of water ice under extreme pressure. The paper titled "Topological phase transitions and their thermodynamic fate in arbitrary-𝑆 classical pyrochlore spin ice" was published in Physical Review X.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have built a computational framework that captures the full optical cycle of spin defects, including the prediction of internal conversion, a process particularly hard to model. Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, shed light on how to use the defects in the design of quantum materials and could also be applied to a different class of systems used in renewable energy conversion and storage. 

Researchers at the University of Basel have investigated how fine particles in exhaust emissions from aircraft and marine engines change in the atmosphere. Their findings show that aircraft emissions in particular become more toxic over time.

Researchers from the University of Osaka have developed a rhodium-catalyzed reaction that uses a single carbon atom to join two flat molecules into a rigid 3D spirocyclic structure. The reaction cleaves carbon–carbon single bonds and forms four new carbon–carbon bonds around one central carbon. It can join identical or different molecules, and it is expected to aid the design of new functional molecules for applications such as electronic materials.